Giveaway Playbooks: 10 Free Tools to Plan, Fix and Launch

We've launched Playbooks: a free set of interactive tools that turn "how do I run a better giveaway?" into a specific answer in under a minute. No account needed 🎉

Every giveaway comes down to small decisions: which product to use, how to weight your entries, why entries have stalled, whether you're ready to launch. Each Playbook asks you a few quick questions and hands back a plan, a fix or a checklist built for exactly where you're at, grounded in what actually works across thousands of Gleam campaigns. Here's the full set:

Gleam has four products (Competitions, Rewards, Captures and Galleries), and picking the wrong one is the quiet reason a lot of campaigns underperform. If you're not sure whether your goal is to grow an audience, reward loyal customers, capture leads or showcase content, it's easy to default to the wrong tool and then fight it the whole way through.

This Playbook asks you two quick questions about what you're trying to achieve and points you straight to the product built for it. No feature-comparison tables, no second-guessing, just a clear starting point so you set up the right campaign the first time.

A giveaway can look busy and still not grow anything. Entries trickle in, sharing stays flat, and you're left guessing which part is actually holding you back: the prize, the entry actions, the timing or the way it's being promoted.

Score Your Giveaway grades your setup and shows you exactly what's affecting your results, then gives you the specific fixes that move the needle. You leave with a clear score and a short list of changes to make, not a vague instruction to "make it more viral."

Giveaway rules vary a lot by country and platform (for example they even vary by State in the USA), and getting them wrong is more than a technicality. It can get your promotion pulled, your account flagged, or your winners disqualified. Most people either copy someone else's terms or skip them entirely and hope for the best.

This guide checks exactly what your terms and conditions need to include for where you're running: eligibility, prize disclosure, platform requirements and the clauses you can't leave out. It turns an intimidating legal grey area into a clear checklist, so you launch compliant and protected.

Most giveaways end and everyone moves straight on to the next thing, which is exactly how the same mistakes get repeated. The lessons are sitting right there in your results, but without a framework it's hard to pull them out and act on them.

The Post-Mortem walks you through a structured debrief of a finished campaign (what worked, what didn't, and why) and turns it into concrete changes for next time. Every giveaway becomes a step up instead of a one-off you forget about.

The best giveaways are planned, not thrown together the week before. Miss the lead time you need for prizes, promotion and approvals and you end up launching flat, or scrambling at the last minute and cutting corners.

This Playbook builds you a dated 12-month plan with planning and launch deadlines already built in around the moments that matter to your audience. You get a realistic schedule you can work backwards from, so nothing important gets rushed or skipped.

There's nothing more stressful than a live campaign that isn't converting. The clock is running, the numbers are flat, and panic-tweaking settings usually makes things worse rather than better.

Answer a few questions about your live giveaway and this Playbook diagnoses the most likely cause (prize fit, entry friction, traffic or timing) and hands you a specific action plan to turn it around while it's still running. Think of it as triage for a campaign that's underperforming.

Entry actions are where a giveaway either grows or stalls. Offer too few and there's no real reason for people to share; add too many, or weight them wrong, and entrants bounce before they finish.

This Playbook shows you which actions to add for your specific goal and exactly how to weight them, so you reward the behaviour that actually grows your audience (follows, referrals, email sign-ups) without overwhelming people. You end up with a balanced setup that drives real growth, not just empty clicks.

Running a giveaway by hand (collecting entries in a spreadsheet, verifying actions, drawing a winner yourself) feels free right up until you count the hours and the risk of getting it wrong. It's the hidden cost most people never add up.

This Playbook lays out exactly what changes when you switch to Gleam: the time you get back, the fraud and manual errors you avoid, and the entry methods you simply can't run on your own. It's an honest side-by-side so you can see where the tool earns its place.

Paid ads and giveaways both buy you leads, but at very different real costs, and most people never actually put the two side by side. It's easy to keep pouring budget into ads simply because it's the default.

This calculator works out your true cost per lead for each, factoring in prize, spend and expected results, so you can see which channel gets you more for your budget. You make the call with real numbers instead of gut feel.

The moment right before launch is where small oversights turn into live problems: a broken link, a missing rule, an entry method that quietly doesn't fire. By the time you notice, entrants have already hit it.

This Launch Playbook runs a 10-point pre-launch check across the things that most often go wrong and gives you a fix list for anything you're missing. You hit publish knowing your giveaway is set up to succeed, not just hoping it is.

Whether you're planning your first giveaway or rescuing one that's already live, there's a Playbook for exactly where you are right now.

  Explore all 10 Playbooks